Perspectives by Rinaldo S. Brutoco

Rinaldo S. Brutoco is the Founding President and CEO of the Santa Barbara-based World Business Academy and a co-founder of JUST Capital. He’s a serial entrepreneur, executive, author, radio host, and futurist who’s published on the role of business in relation to pressing moral, environmental, and social concerns for over 35 years Truth, Justice, and the American Way

Writing this column on Juneteenth, I am reminded of Bryan Stevenson’s fabulous 2014 book Just Mercy. In it, he observes that “Capital punishment means, ‘them without capital get the punishment’...” Stevenson ends the description of his first experience with prisoners on Georgia’s death row with this musing, “My short time on death row revealed that there was something missing in the way we treat people in our judicial system, that maybe we treat some people unfairly.” Well, folks, this is the understatement of the century. The truth is that our criminal justice system is racist from top to bottom. And, the cost to our society is tremendous.

America is by far the most punitive nation in the world. Today we have the highest rates of incarceration in the world – at least three to seven times higher than most other advanced economies, and 20 times higher than some. Currently, the United States with only five percent of the world’s population houses more than one half the global prison population. And huge numbers of those in prison are there for offences that would provoke fines, or alternative punishments at worst in most other developed countries. Writing a bad check, committing a petty theft, or being caught with a small amount of marijuana can lead to years or a lifetime in prison. Three strikes and you’re out! No hope of parole. Retribution and punishment dominate; education and rehabilitation are politically unpopular. We’d rather spend billions of dollars subsidizing the private prison industry putting people in prison for the rest of their lives, than investing a fraction of those tax dollars on the human potential trapped under individual trauma and societal breakdown as an alternative to our penal system.

This tremendous increase in our prison population is due to increasingly

We are writing this piece on June 19, 2020, and wanted to wish everyone Happy Juneteenth! For many of our readers, this might be the first year you’ve heard about the holiday called Juneteenth, but it’s been celebrated around parts of the United States since 1886, with more and more people celebrating it each year.

Until this week, only Texas had made it a paid holiday, but now more states are joining in. Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia all recognize the date, and a few are moving to join Texas in making it a paid holiday for state workers. Twitter, NFL, and other major organizations are also joining in the celebration this year. According to media outlets, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) plans to introduce legislation to make Juneteenth a Federal holiday and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) announced Thursday that he too will introduce a bipartisan bill in the Senate to the same effect. And, we here at the World Business Academy think this is tremendous! Celebrating the end of slavery in the U.S. is something everyone, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or country of origin, can celebrate.

June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas was the day that the last state to retain slavery, Texas, declared all slaves free – 33 months after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

The Fourth of July, Independence Day, is our national holiday celebrating the political independence of the United States from England.As we all learned in elementary school, that revolution began with the Declaration of Independence which contained this immortal sentence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

At that time, an additional 18 percent of the American population in 1776 was in fact enslaved, and counted only as part of a “man” for census purposes to calculate House of Representative districts.

So Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day, Liberation Day, or Freedom Day, celebrates the end of legal slavery, and the beginning of our struggle to fully embrace the idea that all men (and women) means precisely that: ALL. The dark shadow of slavery and racism began to recede on that first Juneteenth, even as it continues to hang on in our society as one of America’s “original sins.” Just like the Declaration of Independence, Juneteenth is an aspirational holiday and will not be truly “Liberation Day” until the scourge of systemic racism is finally eliminated. It is way past time to finally make good on the promise of equality and freedom that sits at the center of our democracy. By making Juneteenth a National Holiday and celebrating it in our national consciousness, we will bring truth at last to the belief that we are all created equal, and begin to move into a future of true justice. A future of harmonious racial peace and of a genuine belief that achieving equality for all means a rising economic, political, and moral society that will enjoy the fruits of that harmony.

We end this article with this observation from the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny.”

Happy Juneteenth! •MJ

Chef Dario Furlati serving pizza & authentic Northern Italian Cuisine in Montecito, Santa Barbara and Goleta punitive systemic changes in our criminal justice system over the past five decades. In 1970 there were 300,000 Americans behind bars. Now that number is over 2.3 million – that’s a 760 percent increase! This doesn’t even count the close to five million people who are on probation or parole. That’s 7,300,000

With gratitude to our community for its support. people, or four percent of our entire adult population is under correctional supervision. In some states (Georgia) that number rises to approximately ten

We wish you the happiest and healthiest of summers. percent. These numbers are even more staggering when race is taken into consideration: African-Americans are five times more likely to be incarcerated than White Americans. African-Americans make up 40 percent of those in prison and

Now open for lunch, dine-in dinner service and take-out! 11:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday 30 percent of those on parole or probation but just 13 percent of the U.S. adult population. Another common statistic you’ve likely heard: one of every three Black boys born in this century is likely to spend time behind bars. The flip side

We are now open until 9:30.p.m. Friday and Saturday 4 p.m. - 9 p.m. Daily of that statistic: Only one in five Black boys is likely to earn a bachelor’s degree. Make no doubt about it, being convicted of a crime has a lasting impact on a person’s life – it makes it harder to get a job, it makes it harder to find a place to live. In many cases it results in a person being barred, sometimes for life, from 805-884-9419 ext 2 | cadariorestaurants.com receiving food stamps or any form of public assistance, or from living in public housing – even if that’s where everyone else you know lives. And in many states, being convicted of a crime means losing your right to vote, even after 18 MONTECITO JOURNAL “It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.” – Muhammad Ali 25 June – 2 July 2020